Thank you. I am david nassau and i am absolutely delighted to be here. As i tell my history students until they want to choke me, the past is a foreign country. We can visit their, we can try to learn the customs. We can translate the language, and we can feel the air and light. We can smith observances and recoil of the folders. The we are for. We are foreigners. Writing about the recent past is not easy. While i was privileged to spend a lot of time talking to a lot of kennedys, it was difficult to weed as a historian, working with living people. I would much prefer to work with documents. You have to figure out what is true and what is not true. Where the story came from. Because the stories are all told with the same authenticity and vigor. The other difficulty about writing with the recent past is that it is not always easy or to establish one distance from it. We have a responsibility to demystify and move beyond the cliches about the wisdom and courage of the greatest generation
Enabling [inaudible] its minds boggling howment of tens of billions dollars we have wasted in countries like iraq and afghanistan building while elephant projects of no earthly use and actually battling the insurgency. The Water Treatment plants. Im not sure why we were doing it. I think its something we call the gratitude theory of counterinsurgency. If you give them cool stuff, they will like. You a. If you give them cool stuff and not in control of the area, the other side claim credit for it. And so if you build stuff inside the city but dont control the city, guess what, they will claim it. But the larger problem is if you dont have security, it doesnt matter how much people like you. Theyre not going to come over to your side if they get killed for doing it. Theyre not suicidal. Theyre not going commit suicide because they love a Water Treatment plant. So you have to have basic security. And to establish basic security. You have to have men with guns on the street 247. Its the es
Closer than it does now. What is now washington as you walk that end, that was the neck as you come and from now the south bend into boston. This was an island and one of dozens of islands that occupy gigantic boston harbor. They had ships scattered throughout the harbor in strategic areas and cap the entrance opens so that they could get revisions whether they be from england or from canada. This meant even though they were completely surrounded by land boston as it british occupy a garrison is going to starve. So it became a stalemate that then erupted into violence in the battle of bunker hill in june 1775. And this was a battle like none other. It was a terrifying cater for those not only living in boston but in towns around because all of the roofs of boston were filled with people watching as more than 2000 british regulars made their way across the harbor into the Charles River to the charles town financial and began the assault that would erupt into the battle of bunker hill. S
Understandings, different experiences, and somewhat different outcomes, and some absolutely understood that, and the reason they wanted to be voluntary negroes was effort on their part based on fundamental misunderstanding of the phrase, was to dispel the one drop myth, was as ad race radical way of saying that any reliance on blood or biology to determine race is ridiculous. Race is a social construction that works politically. Some of them were very canny in using it that way. What they didnt understand is that at the time, the phrase voluntary negro with a lot of currency in the day, it felt to the one preferable. Those who were volunteering negroes were blacks who looked so white they could have passed for white, but chose not to, and the most famous and celebrated voluntary negro was walter white behooves so white he was almost translucent. You cant get whiter. Blond hair, blue eyes. He refused to be identified as white. He encysted on his black identity, which he could claim beca
Welcome to history 3011 the American Revolution. Hope all of you had a great spring break last weekend and look forward to hearing a little bit more about. What you did . In our upcoming discussions now we spent the last two weeks talking about the war of independence the actual war. And the amazing thing about the revolution is that while war was raging american drove constitutions and debated how to construct a government that would protect the peoples rights and in facilitate their happiness. I mean this word happiness is not just appear in the declaration of independence. It appears over and over and over again in the discussions around the formation of state constitutions and in the earliest bills of rights, so, you know, i think we need to think about how emotion and sentiment are part of the goals of the revolution of really creating a government thats going to contribute to individual fulfillment as well as the common good and that both of those goals were intertwined the fulfi